As with most things in business, it's the details that count... and as far as product descriptions and images are concerned for your retail e-commerce website, attention to detail is exactly what you need to make your website fly in the search engines.

Lack of good copy for products on retail websites accounts for quite a large percentage of lost sales. Because your potential customers cannot physically see the products you sell prior to purchase, they are totally reliant on clear, detailed images and accurate, well written descriptions to convey the quality and desirability of those products.  Every retail website owner must make sure that each product image is well formatted both for the web and for viewers, plus all product text must be accurately researched and written, containing product relative keywords.

Some top tips for creating product level copy which will help the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) efforts:

Images

Images are important for a retail website, as they convey not only the product, but the perceived quality of  the product and the service you are supplying. Images therefore have to be of professional quality and be taken with thought to both aspect and the fit of your website. You should aim to:

• Make sure that images show your products in their best light - fuzziness, use of poor light or images with confusing backgrounds should be avoided
• Use well optimised images that are suitably compressed for the web. Page load times are hampered by images that are badly optimised and as page load time affects how the search engines view your website, it's good to make sure your images are properly optimised for viewing on the web.
• Make good use of your image ALT tags... this is important on two levels
  1. This is a requirement to conform to the Disabilities and Discrimination Act 2004, a legal requirement for business websites in the UK.
     
  2. Good use of ALT tags can add to your SEO efforts, as you can utilise these tags to add to targetted content for your website.

Text

Textual content should be the main emphasis if you are optimising your retail website for the search engines. Search engines can only read plain text and a limited number of HTML and CSS tags, so you should aim to create well written content that is above all unique and is interesting for your website visitors. Think about it as a sales pitch... this is your one and only chance to bag that customer before they leave the store and go somewhere else!

When you are creating textual content for your products you should:

• Never copy content from someone elses website. There are two reasons for this:
  1. This can get you in trouble, as the copyright laws were changed a couple of years ago and you can be sued heavily for this.
  2. Search engines want fresh, unique content. If you copy someone elses content then you will (at best) degrade your website in the search results, at worst you will get your site de-listed completely and receive no traffic at all from the search engines.
• Write content which is gramatically correct and free from spelling errors. Reading badly written product descriptions can put off your hard-won website visitors and may lose you that sale!
• Make sure you do your research prior to writing your product descriptions - there may be keywords you could use to describe the product which could bring you some targetted traffic which may turn into a sale.
• When you have a good idea of the keywords to target for each of your products, write copy which reflects these keywords. Product level descriptions are the last stop for search engine spiders from your homepage - if the spiders are fed with keyword rich, well written content then your chances of getting top placement for your products in search results is greatly increased.

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Posted by David Fairhurst on 17 March 2009 17:20:00 GMT #